


drag me in with maybes, ending one.

by sp201120122013



Series: Drag Me In With Maybes [2]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 13:48:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/504157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sp201120122013/pseuds/sp201120122013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>alternate ending one of this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drag me in with maybes, ending one.

I stayed away from work that whole week. I couldn't make it. I called in sick to school, though I wasn't. Or maybe I was. I wasn't so well suited to distinguish right now. I stewed around in a pair of pajama pants and my pullover from that first time I had touched him. I hadn't washed it since, and it was stiff with sweat. Fresh and old sweat. I was sleeping here and there, aided by a just-expired bottle of Ny-Quil. I was going through night sweats, and I was talking all the time. My brother had come down to check on me at my mother's orders, a peanut butter sandwich on a plate that I discovered when I creaked my eyes open at some hour, any hour. I wasn't sure.

 

When I finally came to enough sense to waddle upstairs for water, my clothes clinging to me, that was when he told me I had been talking in my sleep. He didn't tell me what I had said, but the way he glared at me like I was something sick succeeded my suspicions. I had been talking about Frank. It made sense, as I had been dreaming about him, too. Nothing in excess. More like a video on repeat, his pajamas rustling and then his eyes bulging and then me running, running, running. I excused myself from the kitchen to vomit again.

 

Vomiting had been my main past time since that night. Thankfully, the universal fear of biohazard and the natural human aversion to regurgitation was excuse enough to keep me out of the real world. That, and there had actually been a blizzard. I didn't learn of it until I got out of the basement long enough to peek out of the living room curtains. Jersey was shut down, a city in a globe. I hoped that the snow and ice would stay long enough to keep me undercover. Perhaps if I actually covered myself, if I left my bed for an igloo, I'd stop waking up queasy and instead wake up dead.

 

It seemed like the best solution.

 

I couldn't see Frank. It was impossible. One look between us and he would know. He already knew what I had been doing there, that night. Not only had he seen my face, but he had seen me clumsily tugging my hand out of my pants before I fled. He wasn't stupid. The sharpness I'd admired in him before was biting me in the can now. I was done. There was no way I could get myself out of this, not a way in the world. I leaned over my bed and got sick again, briefly, throwing up toast and water. It made me think of sandwiches, and Frank, and I heaved harder.

 

Despite the constant sweating and vomiting, and my mother's distant efforts to nurse me--she didn't want to get too close--I still had to go back to living. The snow melted quickly in one day's leap of temperature, and I was forced out of the house and off to school. I was getting D's and C's this semester. My parents were not pleased. They told me I'd better hold onto that job at the deli, they said. They said I should get used to working there, because that might be all I ever get in life. My brother sneered at me through all their lectures. He was in the running for valedictorian. They never failed to remind me how much better he was than me.

 

It wasn't hard to top me off, though. After class finally ended, after my car huffed and stalled through the cold roads, I parked it and crept through puddles of slush to the deli door. The store was empty. It was too early for Frank, but apparently too early for anyone else, too. My manager was working today, filling in for one of the sick girls. A lot of people had been sick lately, she told me. It must be a bug, she speculated. I smiled, feeling my stomach lurch through my own lingering sickness. I didn't have a bug. Just a bad case of trepidation.

 

The hours went slowly, but that was fine. When three o'clock finally hit, I wanted to turn the clock backwards. I wanted time to keep him as far away as possible. Frank coming was the epitome of disaster, and every time I heard the bell on the door jingle my insides leapt and my skin crawled. I served coffee after coffee to faces I forgot, and felt myself growing sicker and sicker as more time passed. I didn't want Frank to come, but at the same time, I felt as if I'd die if I didn't see Frank. Dying seemed like an excellent way to avoid the situation, though.

 

The situation presented itself too quickly, though. At 3:53, I saw Frank, flanked by two taller men. He looked wide awake, clean-scrubbed, and then men were wearing thick navy coats. Uniforms. I stared at him, and he glanced at me for one second before he turned back to the other two men, periodically looking back at me and mumbling to them frantically. They nodded, shooting far stronger glares in my direction. Frank's eyes didn't have that sharpness. They were wide, dark and wet. They looked just the same as they had that night, and was it a week ago? Was it that long? I couldn't remember. But I noticed that they looked scared. They looked the same as they had when that other man had come in and apprehended Frank. And was that...was that my fault? Had I...had I scared him?

 

The gravity of that hit me, and I bolted to the back room. My manager looked at me, worried, but I was too busy holding down vomit to notice. I threw up in the employee toilet, and it ached. I hadn't been eating enough to provide my stomach with anything decent to regurgitate, and my throat burned and my teeth scraped together. I could feel the sweating starting again, and I was shaking violently. I didn't know I was sobbing until I noticed my manager was speaking over me. Her voice wasn't as gentle to me as it normally was. She told me that I needed to come back out as quickly as possible.

 

Quickly was fifteen minutes later. 4:14. I had cleaned the bile off of my face with paper towels, scrubbing off the sweat and tears, too. My manager was staring at me as if she were offended, and the two men were flanking Frank, looking down at him as he stood up straight, looking at me.

 

"Is that him?" one of the men leaned over to ask, loudly.

 

"Yeah, that's him." Frank said. There was a quaver in his voice, but not in his eyes. They had gone from scared to hard, and they were holding me down. 

 

Then it was the police officers holding me down on the counter, cuffing my hands behind my back as I started crying again, and it was me getting hauled out to stand against the cold metal of a car and be frisked down. 

 

It was the poking of the edges of the folding chair into my sides as I retched inside of the questioning room, under fluorescent lights.

 

It was my parents coming, no, just my mother. I hadn't used my phone call. I heard my manager. She was speaking to my mother.

 

The police had grabbed my bag. I saw it on the table and there, there was my sketchbook. They were looking through it. They weren't being very careful with the pages, and they ripped through them. Their faces weren't covered in marvel, but disgust.

 

"It's the kid, all right."

 

"Looks just like his school photo."

 

"Ninth grade school photo. That's how old the kid is."

 

"Sick."

 

"Look at this."

 

"I don't want to."

 

"Send it to Peterson, he'll need to photocopy these. Evidence."

 

I was staring at the puddle my shoes were making on the tile floor and eavesdropping on a million conversations that I didn't want to hear.

 

"He seemed so nice at work."

 

"He always just stayed in his room...he...he's always been strange. We should have known something was wrong."

 

"Don't blame yourself."

 

"I don't understand, especially with how well our other son is doing so well. Did you know he's going for valedictorian?"

 

"That's really something. You must be very proud."

 

"I just wish we didn't have to deal with this."

 

"He's nineteen though, isn't he? He really isn't your problem to handle anyore."

 

"Does that mean they're going to try him as an adult?"

 

"I think so. The little boy, his parents seemed very upset."

 

"I want to apologize to them, but...I don't even know where to begin."

 

"The drawings....I think that's what disturbs me the most. Before he was hired, he would always sit in the back and draw. I wonder...oh my god, I wonder if he was even...I wonder how long this has been going on?"

 

"Mrs. Way?"

 

"Yes?"

 

"We're going to need to search your house. His room, specifically. I'm going to assume there's more evidence down there."

 

No, not my room. That was my entire life, the art that I had created of Frank in the past few months, that was all I had. And they were going to take it. They were going to steal it all. I jerked my head up, looking for someone else in the room. But I was alone. The light was flickering and it was all I had to look at aside from the furniture. I stopped breathing.

 

\---

 

"Hyperventilating."

 

"This one, you think he'll plead insanity?"

 

"No."

 

"No?"

 

"He's not insane. Just disturbed."

 

\---

 

"You need to change into these."

 

\---

 

"This is where you'll be staying."

 

\---

 

"Does that one have a roommate yet?"

 

"No, he's...mentally delicate, is what it says in his report. We're going to keep him solitary. Besides...if the other prisoners, if they knew what he was here for? They wouldn't treat him so well."

 

"What happened?"

 

"Well, the day before the blizzard hit, this tiny little kid--middle school? High school, maybe? Well, he comes in with his parents, and he tells us--and he's crying, keep in mind--that he saw this guy. That guy, now. But he was like, looking through his window and well, you know."

 

"Ugh, sick."

 

"Isn't it? But that's not the top of it. They go and search the guy's house...or room, whatever. He was still living with his parents. But they find all of these...drawings, and portraits and shit. And they're all of this kid."

 

"You're kidding."

 

"I couldn't make this up, man. Some of them have been filed away, they're...obscene. Still trying to figure out if they count as child pornography, last I heard."

 

"Are they that bad?"

 

"Some of them are just the kid's face. That's how we knew it was him, that's why it's so crucial as evidence."

 

"You seen the dirty ones?"

 

"I saw a couple. Made me feel sick."

 

"Is the kid, like..."

 

"It's obvious what the intent was. There are a couple of the kid in...situations. But mostly they're just the kid standing there. Still fucking sick. Nothing I ever want to see again."

 

"Did the....the kid wasn't like, posing for him, was he?"

 

"No. He just caught the guy looking through his window in the middle of the night."

 

"God. How does shit like this even happen?"

 

"I don't even know, man. But you should see the kid. He's really, really torn up."

 

"Hope his parents buy him some curtains."

 

"Hope his parents get him into some fucking therapy."

 

\----

 

I spent a lot of time facing the wall. I spent a lot of time lying on the cot with my knees to my chest. There was always a guard monitoring me, I suppose for suicide watch or something like that. I was too busy contemplating killing myself to actually do it. My parents didn't visit, or bail me out. No one came. I was sent a letter, though. My parents told me they had taken me out of school, and that they would be taking money out of my bank account to pay off the loans. That was all they said. It wasn't really their company I missed, though.

 

It was Frank. Through the whole thing, all I could think of was Frank.

 

\----

 

I saw him a few weeks later. He was across the room, and he didn't look well. I probably looked worse, but he was slumped over in the baggiest sweatshirt I'd ever seen. His hair was cut shorter again, and I could barely see his fingertips for his sleeves. I stared at him, mouth open. It was the first soup given after starvation, the glass of water out of the desert. His parents caught me glaring and I turned away.

 

Later, I got to hear Frank speak. It was more than he had ever said to me, even in his most passionate bursts of insult. 

 

"He was there every day, after I would stop there for food on the way home."

 

"When did this start?"

 

"A week or so after I went back to school. I didn't think anything of it."

 

"Did he speak to you?"

 

"No."

 

"Ever?"

 

"I don't remember. I don't think so."

 

"What was he doing, when you saw him?"

 

"Drawing."

 

"Drawing you?"

 

"I couldn't see."

 

"We have a drawing of his, dated September 8th. Were you there on that day?"

 

"Was it a school day?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Yeah."

 

"Do you want to see the drawing?"

 

"No."

 

"Excuse me, you. Please hand this around to the jury. Frank, what happened when he started working there?"

 

"He bought me things."

 

"Food?"

 

"He always bought food for me. Even when I tried to pay, he wouldn't let me."

 

"Did he buy you anything else?"

 

"Cigarettes."

 

"Alcohol?"

 

"No."

 

"Did he ever mention alcohol, or any other substances?"

 

"No."

 

"Did he smoke the cigarettes with you?"

 

"No, he just gave them to me."

 

"Did he have conversations with you after buying you things?"

 

"Sometimes. He never spoke very much."

 

"Earlier, were you ever aware he was drawing you?"

 

"No."

 

"Did he ever ask you to go places with him?"

 

"No, but he would give me rides home."

 

"He did? How many times?"

 

"A few."

 

"Did he speak very much in the car?"

 

"No."

 

"Did he ever try and touch you?"

 

"No."

 

 

\-------

 

"Presenting this evidence against the defendant, we can see the obvious resemblance between Frank Iero and the boy depicted in these pieces of art--the dates they were created also coincide with the beginning of his stalking of the boy. If you look at not only the face, but also the physical structure, there is no doubt that it could be anyone other than the boy. Looking at....these last, most recent drawings...it is obvious that the defendant had sexual designs on the boy. Given the age of the individual depicted, I would also suggest a charge to include creation and intended distribution of child pornography."

 

\------

 

"Was that the only time you had ever seen him outside your house?"

 

"Yes. But the night before I thought I had heard something."

 

"Was this man abusing himself while observing you?"

 

"From what I could see, yeah."

 

"What were you wearing?"

 

"Pajama pants."

 

"Nothing else?"

 

"No."

 

"Had you changed clothes in your room, on either of those days?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Would he ever had been able to see you naked?"

 

"Yes."

 

 

\-----

 

"...and, based on the physician's report, the boy was not raped or hurt in any way. However, given the drawings for comparison....the physician also informed us that the depictions of the boy's genitalia are exact. The defendant had to have seen them at some point or another."

 

"Sick."

 

"How does anyone even do that?"

 

"He's just a boy."

 

\----

 

"Given the evidence...."

 

 

\-----

 

"The jury has decided..."

 

\----

 

"In the case of Gerard Way, February 22nd...."

 

 

 

\----

 

 

 

"Guilty."

 

 

 

\------

 

 

 

"Guilty."

 

 

 

 

\------

 

 

 

"Guilty."

 

 

 

 

\------

 

As the noise in the jail died down that evening, after a meal on a tray was brought to me, I turned my attention to the wall again. I didn't have any chalk, not a stick of graphite or even a stray ballpoint pen. But I had my finger, and the whitewashed bricks. I traced my favorite lines, the ones I had committed so well to memory over their rough, bumpy surface. Cheeks, chin, hair, ears, mouth, nose, eyes. I still had Frank. He wasn't really gone, and I'd be fine here. I could sketch him on my wall whenever I wanted. I could arrange the dust into the patterns I remembered, and fold the blankets into origami of a memory. I could stare at my hands and remember that one time he had touched me. Frank wasn't gone. Frank had always been with me, every hour from the first time I had seen him. That wasn't changing now. There was nothing different. 

 

He was an image, to the end of it all. And not a single speck of that image would ever, ever be erased from my memory.

\--end


End file.
